"I find myself inclined, my friend, to demonstrate to you how it's exceedingly rare for us to speak the truth without lying. To this end I take a very simple object, a beautiful antique bust of Socrates, Aristides, Marcus Aurelius, or Trajan, and before this bust I place the Abbé Morellet, Marmontel, and Naigeon, all three charged with writing their thoughts in a letter to you the next day. The result would be three very different kinds of encomia. To which of them would you subscribe? To the cold assessment of the Abbé? To the epigrammatic, ingeniously phrased verdict of the academician? Or to the ardent text of the younger man? As many different judgments as men. We're each organized differently. None of our sensibilities are exactly alike. We all make use, in our various ways, of an instrument in itself corrupt, employing a dialect prone to express either too much or too little and we address the sounds of this instrument to a hundred people who listen, understand, think, and feel quite differently from one another. Nature has bestowed upon us, in the sensory faculties, a set of little boxes in which it traces the profile of truth. The beautiful, the rigorous, the accurate tracing will be the one that conforms at all points to the impression and so produces its double. The tracings of a man whose senses are acute and who's possessed of exceptional taste will provide the closest approximation. Those of the enthusiast, of the sensitive man with a volatile, hasty, violent, and admiring temperament will omit a great deal; while the tracings of the cold, mean-spirited, jealous critic are deforming. His chisel is directed by ignorance or passion, demarcating lines which diverge first to one side, then to the other. And envy cuts into the profile, resulting in an image which bears no resemblance to anything."

– Denis Diderot, from The Salon of 1767, translated by John Goodman (Yale University Press, 1995)

"If these students should be inclined to profit further from my advice, I'd say to them: Hasn't it been long enough for you to see only a portion of the objects you copy? Try, my friends, to imagine that the entire figure is transparent, and that your eyes look out from its center. From there you'll observe the complete exterior disposition of the machine; you'll see how some parts are extended while others are contracted, how the former stretch out while the latter expand; and, consistently preoccupied by the overall effect, by the whole, you'll succeed in showing in that part of the object presented in your drawing everything that would correspond with it but that's not visible, and though displaying only one of its views to me you'll oblige my imagination to envision the opposite view as well; and it's then that I'll write that you're a surprising draftsman."

– Denis Diderot, from The Salon of 1765, translated by John Goodman (Yale University Press, 1995)

"Here you are again, great magician, with your silent arrangements! How eloquently they speak to the artist! How much they have to tell about the imitation of nature, the science of color and harmony! How freely the air circulates around your objects! The light of the sun is no better at preserving the individual qualities of the things it illuminates. . . . If it's true, as the philosophers claim, that nothing is real save our sensations, that the emptiness of space and the solidity of bodies have virtually nothing to do with our experience, let these philosophers explain to me what difference there is, four feet away from your paintings, between the Creator and yourself."

– Denis Diderot, from The Salon of 1765, translated by John Goodman (Yale University Press, 1995)

COMRADES OF TIME

"Hesitation with regard to the modern projects mainly has to do with a growing disbelief in their promises. Classical modernity believed in the ability of the future to realize the promises of past and present – even after the death of God, even after the loss of faith in the immortality of the soul. The notion of a permanent art collection says it all: archive, library and museum promised secular permanency, a material infinitude that substituted for the religious promise of resurrection and eternal life. During the period of modernity, the 'body of work' replaced the soul as the potentially immortal part of the Self. . . . But today, this promise of an infinite future holding the results of our work has lost its plausibility. Museums have become the sites of temporary exhibitions rather than spaces for permanent collections. The future is ever newly planned – the permanent change of cultural trends and fashions makes any promise of a stable future for an artwork or a political project improbable."